Dan Pearce

has taught draw­ing and print­mak­ing at Colch­ester School of Art, and given print­mak­ing and draw­ing work­shops in the UK, Spain and now Italy where he lives.

Bosky, al fresco Studio

Still Life con Brio

He is an artist with loads of draw­ing, water­colour, oils, land­scape, por­trait, silkscreen print­ing, etch­ing and even car­toon experience.

From May 8th to 15th this spring he is giv­ing a six-day course

which will whizz you through a for­mi­da­ble ground­ing in accu­rate draw­ing and per­spec­tive, swoop you through an inspir­ing vari­ety of styles, tech­niques and mate­ri­als, and send you home with a paint­ing of your own to dis­play with pride upon your man­tel­piece. He’s happy to teach stu­dents of all abilities.

It may be help­ful to have an idea of what you want to end up with — land­scape, still life, flow­ers in the Dutch style or a la Charleston, per­sonal trea­sures to paint with the sharp del­i­cacy of Eliz­a­beth Black­ad­der — for which you might bring pho­tos, mag­a­zine pages, shells or objets. And, with­out being too inte­rior design­ery, an idea of the colour range might be use­ful. If you have water­colours, please bring them. Dan will pro­vide oils and canvases.

Ste­van and Matt tackle Mount Cetona

Quiet Pride, why not?

I’m Miranda, Dan’s wife.

In Spe­cial Moroc­can yoga out­fit plus Ganesha

In addi­tion to the above, I’m happy to give hatha yoga classes (240 hour qual­i­fi­ca­tion, £10 per ses­sion) and, if you yearn to write, I have been a jour­nal­ist for a cou­ple of decades, have pub­lished some 20 books and would be delighted to give a lit­tle gen­tle coach­ing and direc­tion, for which I would not charge.

A typ­i­cal day

Yoga from 8.30 to 9.30 for those who want.

Break­fast of muesli, eggs, home­made bread, yoghurt, tea or coffee.

Painting/drawing from 10.30 until 1pm.

Light, sal­ady lunch from 1 until 2.30pm

More art until 5.30pm.

Sup­per from 7.30, with local Madrevite wine

Price

Bed and full board (break­fast and lunch every day, din­ner out the last night) £450 each based on two peo­ple shar­ing a twin room. £200 sin­gle room sup­ple­ment. We can pick up Ryanair Peru­gia pas­sen­gers, for which we will make a small charge. Or if you fly to Rome, we’ll pick you up from Chiusi Rail­way Station

Santa Lucia

The estate looks like this in May

The house is one of thirty or so on a farm­ing estate/agriturismo of 600 hectares. It has an ancient, out of date web­site www.lecoste.it which prob­a­bly tells you about its two ten­nis courts, three swim­ming pools, foot­ball pitch etc, but may fail to tell you about how lovely the nature reserve is, the vari­ety of wood­land walks there are, stuffed with deer, bad­gers, por­cu­pines, rab­bits, foxes, styl­ish black squir­rels, wild­flow­ers, funghi, etc etc

The swim­ming pools, used by all the pre­dom­i­nantly Eng­lish peo­ple who live here, are a beau­ti­ful ten minute walk away. The pre­vail­ing aura is Ital­ian hill­billy. Don’t expect Milan designer chic.

Our house, Santa Lucia, orig­i­nally built over 100 years ago, was flat­tened by Ger­man bombers in 1944 and imme­di­ately rebuilt. Occa­sion­ally elderly women fetch up here, who were born, mar­ried and had babies here, sur­vived the war and Ger­man occu­pa­tion, the destruc­tion of the house and its recon­struc­tion. This house was bil­leted to Ger­mans sol­diers who slept in what is now my work­space — both women said bel­liger­ently that the Ger­mans were ‘Very nice!’

At that time, mez­zadria was prac­tised — these big houses were dor­mi­to­ries (10 peo­ple lived in this one) for share­crop­pers who had to give half of every­thing they pro­duced to the land­lord in the big house on the hill. This — and life­long servi­tude to the Catholic Church which also owned slaves who had to give the church half — con­tin­ued until 1969. There were cat­tle in what is now our kitchen, goats in our work­rooms, plough-horses, pigs, chick­ens, and the main crop was tobacco, which belonged to the gov­ern­ment, whose inspec­tors would come to count every leaf.

We are equidis­tant between Rome and Flo­rence — both are an easy daytrip by train. You can see our pre­cise loca­tion on Google, PG 06062 is the post code. Moiano is the near­est vil­lage, a walk­a­ble dis­tance, with post office, new bar, old com­mu­nist bar, front organ­i­sa­tions for who knows what sell­ing hand­bags, jew­ellery, Hello Kitty lug­gage, life­size ceramic pan­thers. There is also a very good restau­rant, occa­sion­ally patro­n­ised by some­one who has just won an Oscar, whose m-in-law lives up the hill and does yoga with me on Thursdays.

If you would like to know more, please con­tact Dan at danielmarescopearce@gmail.com